Kemb, 30 January 2018

At the next crooked bend in the turning,
Where the current exchanged slower
For faster water, and then faster for slower,
I wondered what I would barter for more
Leisurely drifting on the river. What if
Every origin myth from before Adam until
After the Big Bang had run it all backward?
It was not everything exploding from nothing
(And how could it? Why would it?)
But everything first, everything still, static,
And therefore not a nothing at all, only
What I might call nothing much. Imagine
An hourglass jammed, sand in a sphere.
It’s all there, all going nowhere, the original
Heaven of nothing ever happening, happening
Forever. A hole in the bottom, the doorway
Of time, the insertion of gravity draining
Everything toward empty, so it all spills away.
Now imagine a vast collection of such spheres
A sphere of packed spheres all draining inward
To the inifinitesimal, infinite nonconformity
At the center of all spheres, the black hole
As god, each sphere draining at a different rate.
The confluence of all the intersecting sands
Become gems, beams, atoms, particles of light,
The world as we know it, heading steadily
But unfathomably variously toward
The vanishing, away from static plenitude
Through the elaborate relationships
Created by zero tugging out the different
Rates of change. Do you know, now, what
Gravity is? Gravity is nothing itself, drawing
Us out and down and on from nothing much.
I watched the fine silt swirling in the vortices
Around my little floating coracle of skull.